With the next console generation just barely peeking up over the horizon, I think we can safely say one thing is certain: For the most part, they won’t be backwards-compatible.

Already, the vestiges of the practice of making old games work in new consoles are disappearing. Nintendo’s Wii-U might end up a notable exception — it’ll play your old Wii games, for example. Not GameCube games, though, even though the Wii was capable of supporting those. For the rest of your old Nintendo library, you’ll need downloads.

As for the next Playstation and Xbox iterations, it’s probably pretty safe to say that you’re seeing the last of those platforms’ backward compatibility capabilities. The Playstation 3 originally included backward compatibility, but that hardware was thrown out to reduce costs within the first year of the system’s life. The Xbox 360 notably managed to become backward compatible for most of the games in the old Xbox library, but it required a ton of extra software because Microsoft didn’t own the rights to the original Xbox processor — which mean that compatibility programs for every game had to be created after the fact.

While backward compatibility between the next generation and this one will likely be easier for the console makers to accomplish, there’s one big reason that they won’t do it: They don’t have to. If there’s anything the rise of digital distribution has demonstrated, it’s that gamers are willing to pay again for old games. You’ve demonstrated that you like your old games, and would like to play them on your new hardware — so why would Microsoft, Sony or anyone give away the privilege for free?

We’re already seeing the push in the new direction of paying for games more than once. Nintendo has done extremely well with its Wii Virtual Console, which has made a host of back-catalog Nintendo games available to customers who want to pay for them. Many of those games haven’t been available on a new system for years, really, like items from the old NES and SNES library.

Sony has picked up on the trend, too, making a whole lot of old Playstation and Playstation 2 games available as digital downloads, as has Microsoft. Given the success all three have found in making older games available to new players, it seems obvious that there won’t be any sort of push to make sure you can play Xbox 360 games on your Xbox Whatever — and even if you can, you definitely won’t see original Xbox games being played on it. Of course, hardware costs are undoubtedly a factor when it comes to consoles, but there’s clearly money to be made in this space, and Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are interested in making it.

On the one hand, it’s a good thing. Nintendo’s Virtual Console managed to scare up games that are simply no longer available anywhere else. If you’re lucky enough to have an old copy of Super Metroid, plus a working SNES, then congratulations on being lucky and fortuitous in your protection of video gaming history. If not, though, there were years when you were SOL on that front, particularly if you knew nothing of the emulator scene on PC. Opening up old game libraries makes a lot of titles players have never heard of available to them for the first time.

On the other hand, we’re almost definitely going to be rebuying the same games we’ve already bought in the future. There’s not really a solution to that part.

It’s no secret that the tremendous advances in computer tech have vastly increased the potential to use a video game to tell a story. Naturally, this has led to some highly complex takes on crime, police corruption and most ubiquitously, war. But even as crime genres have become increasingly bleak, war games remain somewhat where they were 10 years ago, albeit with fantastically improved graphics: you can shoot the enemy, you can even shoot buildings, but there’s no way to shoot the noncombatants.

So why is it that despite the ability to do so, war games are always built with restrictions of this type? The answer is what you’d expect: In a deliberately over the top crime game where the entire point is a sort of parody of modern urban living, rampant violence of this sort is kind of the point. But in a game with far more apparent real-world relevance, like war games, it could create problems for developers, and not just because of complaints from parents’ groups.

Rock Paper Shotgun was able to confirm those concerns when they spent some time at EA Dice HQ for a hands on with Battlefield 3 and had the chance to talk to BF3 executive producer Patrick Bach about this issue. Bach’s answers confirm what we already know – people can be pretty nasty when the rules are turned off:

Games are where movies were in the 30s or 40s, when it went from a technical spectacle to ‘hey, wait a minute we can actually use this to tell something, be political’ and things like that. I think we are on the verge of seeing things like that.

[However] if you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go dark side – because people think it’s cool to be naughty, they won’t be caught…

In a game where it’s more authentic, when you have a gun in your hand and a child in front of you what would happen? Well the player would probably shoot that child.

This makes sense to us. Anyone who’s watched other people playing a Grand Theft Auto game can attest that you can quickly find out what your friends would be like with the rules turned off. Some people will still opt to avoid truly monstrous behavior. Others will get on top of cars and blow civillians away without hesitation. In a war game, it would be beyond disturbing to see which players delight in indulging their inner war criminal. A serious war-is-hell game will have to wait until such a story can be successfully told while retaining the no-war-crimes restriction.

The whole thing’s definitely worth a read. But what do you think? Is it possible to take away all the rules, save the ones players impose on themselves, and not have a war game descend into the worst bits of WWII? And either way, how would you go about telling the perfect, serious war story in a game?

A family friend told Channel 2’s Sophia Choi that the teen was angry that he was told to stop playing the game Halo. Investigators said he used a 34- to 36-inch sword to cut his grandmother, 55-year-old Laura Prince, in the arm and to kill his great-grandmother, 77-year-old Mary Joan Gibbs, on Monday.

If true, this would be a terrible story about the importance of making sure that people do not become addicted to video games. However, below this assertion, a few more facts spill out:

The attack marks the third time deputies have encountered the teen.
Sheriff Phil Miller said on two previous occasions, the teen was sent to a hospital to be mentally evaluated and then turned over to Juvenile Justice. But both times, Miller says, the boy was released, despite his violent history.
“It just seems to me that somebody may not be doing what they could do, or we may be dropping the ball somewhere in the system,” Miller told Choi.

]]>http://www.gamefront.com/boy-with-a-history-of-violence-kills-grandmother-with-sword-halo-blamed/feed/4Oasis’ Noel Gallagher: Video Games Did So Cause The London Riot!http://www.gamefront.com/oasis-noel-gallagher/
http://www.gamefront.com/oasis-noel-gallagher/#commentsMon, 15 Aug 2011 19:04:31 +0000Ross Lincolnhttp://www.gamefront.com/?p=117375Because a crisis just isn't resolved until a washed up rock star has his say.

At the height of last week’s horrific British riots, we insisted that no, seriously, the London riots weren’t caused by video games. How wrong we were! We now realize that before making such a definitive statement, we should have consulted noted expert in civil unrest and urban violence, former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher.

The songwriter behind “Wonderwall” and “Supersonic”, clearly having devoted his life since the 2009 breakup of Oasis to the study of poverty and political science, weighed in on the British unrest over the weekend. Says Noel:

I don’t care what other people say: Brutal TV and brutal video games are a reason for this pointless violence as well. The people are immune to violence, they are used to it.

Duly noted, guy who used to be famous for ripping off The Beatles. We at GameFront want to apologize for our error, and assure you all that next time there’s a terrifying event of international importance, we will reach out first to Professor Gallagher before commenting.

Fact: People in England are freaking the hell out right now. That whole riot thing, you’ve heard about that, yes? Here’s what seems to have happened:

On Thursday evening, London constabulary shot and killed a Tottenham man, 29 year old Mark Duggan, while he was sitting in the back seat of a taxi cab. No official reason has yet been provided for why local coppers were interested in him: gang ties have been insinuated but no evidence has been forthcoming; Police claim the killing occurred during a gunfight between police and Mr. Duggan. That story was contradicted by some witness accounts as well as later information that became public. This might have blown over, but unfortunately, Police made things worse when they failed to inform the man’s parent’s about his death. The family had to read about it in the local paper.

The murky circumstances obviously left the neighborhood feeling a bit persnickety and on Sunday thousands gathered for what was intended to be a nonviolent vigel for Duggan and his family, largely an attempt to pressure the Metropolitan police to explain themselves and investigate the killing. Tensions were high already, and then things got worse: A 16 year old girl threw rocks at the police standing guard. That’s kind of a dumb move, but then they completely overreacted by ganging up on her 15 to one and beating her senseless. Match, meet kindling. This immediately turned a tense situation into the worst riots England has seen since the Thatcher years.

Now the riots have spread to other cities, police are completely overwhelmed, the citizenry are terrified and both the Prime Minister and the London Mayor look like fools for staying on vacation for nearly 3 days into the mess. It’s a terrible nightmare for people living through it, and clear evidence that whatever the hell is happening, something is really wrong in England. Some are alleging that this riot was instigated by opportunistic thugs looking to take advantage of the chaos by settling scores and looting. Others point to the severe recession, deep cuts in benefits, education and housing affecting people who tend to live in places like Tottenham. Many have pointed out that England has already seen a great deal of activity by an outraged populace on both sides of the political divide in recent months, and seek to fit this riot into that context.

What is wrong, exactly, I am not qualified to say, but it’s probable that whatever the cause, riots of this size do not happen in a vacuum. So obviously it is essential that the British government and local police take careful steps to investigate, identify and mitigate the factors that contributed. Of course, the obvious assumption is that until this calms down we have nothing but speculation to rely on, and maybe people in positions of authority ought to refrain from commenting until they have more data. But of course we don’t live in my fantasy world, and naturally people are making the usual silly assertions.

Go home, get a takeaway and watch anything that happens on TV,” one constable advised. “These are bad people who did this. Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves.

Oh lord, here we go again. Something big, scary, inexplicable has happened and instead of actually examining the causes of that something, people are indulging their dumbest instincts and laying the blame on things that have absolutely no real connection to the event in question whatsoever. The last time we had this conversation, it was about the horrible terrorist attacks in Norway, which left dozens dead and dozens more injured, being blamed on Dragon Age 2. Now, we get to have almost the same conversation about Grand Theft Auto.

Now I have to admit, I’m impressed that this idiot was able to successfully combine the “In my day things were better!” and the “media I don’t understand is ruining the world” arguments into a coherently incoherent baseless assertion, but he did it. Excellent work, constable. That rare accomplishment doesn’t change the fact that this statement just might be the dumbest thing ever said about this mess. It will likely never be topped.

First, the Grand Theft Auto series has sold more than 124 million units since launching in the late 90s. That is at least 40-60 million individual people who have purchased these games and played them to death. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. If GTA causes people to riot and commit crimes, then why haven’t we seen more of this? If anything, at least in the United States, crime is way, way down. Obviously, the nefarious Emma Goldmans* at Rockstar Games are falling down on the job.

Second, if this guy’s reference to Pac-Man being from ‘when I was young’ is any guide, then he is referring to the period after September, 1980 when Pac-Man was released outside of Japan. In which case I want to know how bad things have to get before he stops considering things idyllic and innocent. Because following his logic, here are some of the totally not out-of-control, completely safe and normal uprisings caused by Pac-Man:

Of course, things calmed down once Pac-Man fever ebbed. But then Super Mario Bros. must have outraged people who didn’t like Italian plumbers, because things started heating up again right as that game was released:

Oh how I do ever so miss those days of innocence! The threat of IRA bombings and constant rioting in industrial hellholes, why it’s like the stories of Mark Twain! I tell you these kids today.

But seriously, it was true for the horrific tragedy in Norway and it’s true now: That new violent media you don’t understand did not invent violence and it certainly did not cause it. We understand that easy, insipid conclusions serve the purpose of absolving people from responsibility for things like this, but the citizenry would be better served if their authorities think critically, with an eye to actually solving problems instead. I sincerely hope that this awful violence ends soon, and that in the aftermath, England gets the latter and not the former.

In the meantime, you know the whole shooting thing that started this mess? The London police are finally admitting that there isn’t a shred of evidence that the man they killed was armed. Maybe they ought to consider how enraged people get when the cops kill unarmed people before they start blaming Xbox ownership, mmk?

*NOTE: Emma Goldman was actually awesome. I am assuming the mindset of a thug cop.

Welcome friends! Why don’t you travel with us, back into the mists of the ancient past, to that far off year of 1995, when the Macarena was inexplicably popular and video games were measured in bits. This is the time of legend, when wizards of yore… ok, so the faux-Mallory-esque tone is starting to bore me, so I’ll quit. But what isn’t boring is that original Grand Theft Auto graphics engine programmer Mike Daily is on Flickr, and today he posted the original pitch for that game to his account. All 12 pages of it.

This series of documents isn’t just an interesting insight into the way games used to be (and, in a way, still are) pitched, but also revbeals some rather fascinating information in about the rather tame sounding origins of the infamously sociopathic series, including the fact that the original title was “Race’n'Chase”. They’re not creative commons, so you’ll need to click over to his photostream to view the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

There’s not a lot of gory details – no ‘hookers and blow delivered to development team hourly’ or anything like that – but it’s definitely a funny little window into how something as innocuous as the game described in these documents could change the world. Makes you wonder if the original pitch for Super Mario Bros. was a text based adventure.